This past Monday, I spent the afternoon at the impressive de Young Museum in San Francisco for AMD’s Opteron 6100 series launch event.

The event kicked off with AMD CMO, Nigel Dessau, taking us through a brief history of Opteron, with its rich and compelling message, before introducing attendees to AMD’s latest processor technology.

Nigel was then joined onstage by Christine Reischl, SVP & GM of HP’s Industry Standard Servers group, and Matt Lavallee, Director of Technology for MLS PIN, the northeast’s foremost provider of real estate listings to more than 30,000 subscribers. Matt spoke about his key IT challenges (cost, performance and energy) as well as the dramatic efficiencies in these key areas that he has enjoyed thanks to HP ProLiant technology. Matt has been an HP customer since our first generation of servers and is operating an entirely HP shop!

Christine Reischl went on to talk a bit more about the latest generation of ProLiant servers delivering customers like Matt a return on his server investment in just 2 months (less than a budget cycle) when compared to servers just a few generations old. Christine also spoke about the 27x performance per watt boost these systems deliver, as well as the up to 96% reduction in power and cooling costs customers can reap with HP’s innovative Thermal Logic technologies built right in to our servers.

Here's a picture of Nigel, Christine and Matt on stage:

After HP, Nigel welcomed to the main stage a couple of other OEMs with their customers before thanking the OEM and software partners, customers and attendees for being there.

The event then broke to a very informal reception where press, industry analyst, customer and partner attendees could see the latest AMD Opteron-based platforms available. HP showed off our new ProLiant DL165 and DL385 rack-optimized servers, as well as our SL165z, “skinless” scale-out server.

At one point in the day, I found myself huddled in a near deserted shop next to several Nefertiti statues speaking to some business press reporters via phone on the news of the day. Later Monday evening, Christine and I enjoyed dinner with Nigel and Dave Fionda from AMD where we reflected on the day’s events, chatted about our long-standing partnership and the exciting road ahead.

Overall, our time in San Francisco was beneficial to both HP and AMD and we look forward to a continued partnership.